It came to my attention recently that my ongoing trouncing of CmdrTaco had been interrupted by having myself retired from Whatsbetter.com. Of course I had to do my best to rectify the situation, and the good folks at Whatsbetter.com were happy to oblige. Much to my dismay they had interpreted my lack of recent journal posting as a sign of my demise. While I admit I owe you all a status update on Slashcode (it's coming!) I will have to make do for now with some tidbits from the mailbag:

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Hey sllort,

I've re-enabled the item... One of my admins must have retired it. Your/.jounal has not been updated in the last 5 months. Spending your time at K5these days? Or have you found new and better places to troll;-)

Enjoy the site,-chris

>hello, noticed that in the following pairing:>>http://www.whatsbetter.com/display.pyt?item=14198&item=14199>>one Slashdot user was retired as "old" and the other was not. Just wanted>to let you know that neither user is old nor retired, we both write>journals regularly, here are the links:>>http://slashdot.org/~cmdrtaco/journal/>http://slashdot.org/~sllort/journal/>>I do not like being retired as "old", i'm only 27, i'm active on the site>and i'm as active now as when i was added.>>let me know what you decide,>>-sllort.

Of course, I have no idea what he's talking about with this "trolling" nonsense, but he's re-activated my account for more Taco-crushing, and that's what's important. Thanks, Chris.

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Hi,

as far as I am unknown, the best thing is to introduce myself.

Working in political sciences but interested by IT since I'm 15 (4 yearsalready), I just took some distant glances at/., so far. I just gotinvolved in the overall/. picture, until I got moderation points, tooquickly in my opinion.

I quickly realized that some deep trends where impairing the very spirit ofwhat was in my mind a quite flawless system. I posted various documentedposts questionning Apple's software, marketing policy, prices policy etc.until I just went aware that they were plainly ignored, or modded down. Ijust had the bad taste to say that, at last, Windows XP was a respectableOS. I just had the foolish idea of defending Oracle.

Then I decided to make some researches about people in the same frustratingstate of mind as mine. And quite quickly I found this by now old story aboutthe troll survey. I found that many many clever people were relayed in theremote electronical sphere of purgatory. And that maybe you were the boldestone of these.

So my questions are naturally coming to you : what do you think of Slashdotby now ? Did you improve to evaluate how many people were backing you ? Arethey any other sites as/., with other moderation/participation systems ? Ifnot, what about building an alternative one ?

It just looks like many of us stay frustrated by the current status of/.And frankly this is sad.If in any case you can't/don't want to respond, plz leave a blank message.I'll keep looking for freedom advocates.

Regards,Jdif

p.s : reading Top Ten ?

Wow. "remote electronical sphere of purgatory". Putting aside for a moment your... diction... yes, I've spent some time at k5 recently. K5 is what Taco would call "navel gazer's anonymous", what Seth Finkelstein would call "more writer fair", and what I would call "fractionally less fucked up". As far as being upset with/. - well, they've managed to stay "in business" for five years, and nobody's threatening their market niche yet, though God only knows if they're profitable. It's a sad thing that some real assmasters are in charge, but we can always hope that something better will come along - or as you point out, we can do something about it.

As far as reading goes, allow me to suggest the September and October edition of Trollback - the new editorial staff deserves plenty of praise.

Glad to see you're still in business. As noted in your mailbag, this could be a great system, were it but for the moderation system.

Due to the totaly breakdown of effective moderation (i.e., the editors' ability to moterate in total secret), it seems that the front page has degenerated to braindead AOL-er, whereas the real action lives in the journals, mostly free from moderation and editor corruption.

Perhaps this is the natural evolution of the system, as people will go to where they can talk without bein